The internet’s first podcast in which comedians discuss movies! Starring the crew from FilmDrunk, with rotating guests from the film world and the blogosphere. It’s almost like having friends!

Archive for the 'comedy' Category

Great show this week, as our guest, comedian Joe Sinclitico either makes or ruins my show with his audible vaping. Matt Lieb and Bret were also in the Frotquarters to talk Cecil the Lion, Woody Allen, True Detective, and horrible press tour interviews. Also, Matt Lieb introduces his new segment, the "Uptown Girl Game."

2:00 - PIXELS. I describe the plot for Ufford. "I would not have come on this week if I knew this was what I was in for."

6:30 - We talk about Ufford's tweet about Adam Sandler's 'Fart Vacation,' and what it says about Adam Sandler movies that some people thought this was a real movie.

8:43 - GAWKER DRAMA. We talk about Max Read and Tommy Craggs resigning from Gawker after Gawker took down the Geithner post, and what would have to happen for us to resign in protest from a job we otherwise liked (this from a current Vox employee and an Uproxx employee).

19:30 - The way the current advertising system creates an environment that produces the kinds of shitty, click-bait content everyone hates, even the people writing it.

20:50 - Matt Lieb finds his new least favorite Gawker post, "the bravery of Judd Apatow knows no bounds," a snarky takedown of Judd Apatow's Cosby impression. Ufford and I explain the inside-baseball factors that cause a post like that to get written, and Lieb and I discuss the viability of Cosby jokes.

33:36 - We breakdown my new favorite Amy Schumer thinkpiece, from the Guardian, about how Amy Schumer is now *too* successful, and how that could be "potentially problematic" for her. And society. Or something.

44:22 - PISTOL DRONE FOR PRESIDENT! Ufford and Bret's new social media campaign

48:30 - THE TAYLOR SWIFT BEEFDOWN. We try to parse Katy Perry's incredibly obtuse tweet, and the Matts help us get to the root of the now-legendary Katy Perry/Taylor Swift/Nicki Minaj beef triangle. "I used to know calculus!" sighs Ufford.

58:26 - Your emails. Starting with the guy whose friend named his son "Revin," continuing with the guy whose on-again-off-again girlfriend is banging her platonic friend on a European island somewhere and how he should feel about that.

This week on the Frotcast, the world's best pop culture podcast! Brendan is back in-studio, joining Matt Lieb and Vince Mancini, with guest comedian Torio Van Grol. Topics:

-Matt Lieb's Breakup. Snuggly Rock has crumbled and winter is coming. Matt joins all the dating sites and we discuss the merits of each, from J-Swype (that's the Jewish Tinder) to FarmersOnly and AshleyMadison.

-Dogfight, the backyard brawling documentary from the director of The U.

-Jared from Subway's child porn. Do we hope it's true or untrue?

-Ted 2 - Matt, Vince, and Torio all saw it, and we agreed the funniest bit in it was the stoners in the back row laughing like Beavis & Butthead at all the worst jokes.

- Torio is now a Segway tour guide and tells us about an old lady who fell.

First of all... DON'T FREAK OUT! I opened this week's show with about a minute of Matt Lieb's stand up. It's something I've been wanting to experiment with. After that, it's a regular Frotcast, with Matt Lieb, Bret, and Vince, live in studio.

This week's topics!

-What do deaf people sound like when they orgasm? (Don't ask how we got on this subject)

-The 'rules' of comedy and thinkpiece culture.

-HBO - Game of Thrones and that BIG TWIST in True Detective

-The new 'Snowden' movie and Oliver Stone.

-Danny Boyle's 'Steve Jobs' and Aaron Sorkin in general. (Quoth Bret: "In the first draft of all Aaron Sorkin's scripts, the female characters are all named 'MY EX-WIFE.'")

With Bret and Matt Lieb joining Vince in the Frotquarters, we open this week with a lengthy, or possibly girthy, discussion of Lebron James' penis. Laremy joins via Skype to discuss Pixar's latest, Inside Out, which we both saw. Since we've been off for two weeks, we discuss Jerry Seinfeld's now-infamous "Political Correctness is killing comedy" comment (words Jerry Seinfeld didn't actually say), and Matt's perspective as a fellow Jewish comedian (I'm required by law to mention that Matt is Jewish at least once in every post). After that we talk Rachel Dolezal (because who ISN'T talking Rachel Dolezal, am I right??), people whining about Game of Thrones, and Jurassic World.

Greg Sestero is perhaps best known for playing Mark in The Room ("Oh, hi, Mark."). He's also the co-author of The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, The Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. Michael Rousselet is co-director of Dude Bro Party Massacre III, which also stars Greg Sestero. Rousselet also happens to be one of the first people to discover The Room, helping to make it a cult hit, who's credited for starting many of The Room's now familiar audience participation trends, like throwing spoons at the screen. I got them together 12 years almost to the day after the first The Room screening, to ask Greg what it was like being Tommy Wiseau's producing partner and roommate, his teenage modeling days in Europe, and what it's like having had his life inexorably tied to Tommy Wiseau's for close to 20 years now. And to ask Mike about the first time he saw The Room, and what possessed him to force everyone he knew to watch it. How old is Tommy Wiseau? Where is Tommy Wiseau actually from? How did Tommy Wiseau get so rich, and how could afford to blow $6 million on The Room? What does it all mean? We answer all or none of these questions on this week's BookDrunk Radio.

Vince is down in LA for a special edition Frotcast with Michael E. Peter, Michael Rousselet, and Alec Owen of 5-Second Films, whose crowd-funded magnum opus, Dude Bro Party Massacre III, for which they raised more than $200,000, plays the LA Film Festival this week. We talk about how you make a movie with 12-15 people involved in the creative process and how they scored all their magnificent cameos, from Larry King to Patton Oswalt to Andrew WK. We also discuss how much Larry King got paid ($8, seriously) and what Andrew WK calls his "character supplies" (mostly Doritos and Four Loko). Enjoy.

I know it's probably not why people listen to the Frotcast, but this week, we talk about movies! Lots of them. We open with Kung Fury, now free on YouTube, which we all watched, and mostly enjoyed. After that, I discuss my experience seeing the Entourage movie, which organically leads us into Chet Haze's spirited and similarly tone-deaf defense of using the N-word, aka "N-Star" (including a digression into Brent Weinbach's "Gangsta Party Line"). After that, we discuss the Rashida Jones-produced Netflix documentary about amateur teen porn, Hot Girls Wanted. Which felt very local news scare piece to me. ("It's CALLED amateur porn, and YOUR HOT TEEN could be doing it..."). From there, Matt and I discuss Love & Mercy, the Brian Wilson biopic starring Paul Dano and John Cusack, which Matt is well qualified to critique as a Brian Wilson freak and Beach Boys scholar. Should a biopic just be a dramatic retelling of what you already know or should it try to innovate? Finally, we finish up with your emails, including a bitter script reader's take on "the two wolves story," another reader's rank of the frot crew by f*ckability, and yet another question about the best way to wipe your ass. Frot on and enjoy.

This week on the Frotcast, aka Comedians With Microphones Talking Movies, I talk about San Andreas (my review),
a film about a very muscular, chesty man's love for his chesty wife and
their busty daughter in a time of earthquakes. Bret continues his
journey to shilldom ("I get #horny for #brands!") and Matt Lieb tells us
about his latest commercial, and why Alexandra Daddario is so
attractive it makes him angry. About 30 minutes in, Kaseem Bentley,
(SF Weekly Best of Award Winner for "Racial Humor You Don't Feel Guilty
Laughing At" and one of the Bay Area's “Top 5 Comedians to Watch”
according to the San Jose Mercury News) drops by. Kaseem spends the
first 10 minutes or so making fun of me, my friends, and my past
relationships, then dives down the rabbit hole of obscure San Francisco
comedy references. At one point, he and Matt Lieb have a frank
discussion about the existence of God. I dunno, man. Meanwhile, I try to
ask him questions about his parents being in the Nation of Islam and
the Black Panthers, what the deal is with bean pie, and how it was he
came to be San Francisco's only insult comic/social worker. As always,
Kaseem is really interesting in the brief moments you can get him to
stop being hilarious.

Welcome to another episode of what we like to call "Comedians with Microphones Talking Movies." This week on the Frotcast, our guest is Laremy Legel from Film.Com (and the upcoming movie 'Lightweight'), and the topics are rape scenes in Game of Thrones and feminism in Mad Max: Fury Road. But before we get to that, we've got an update on the "Startup Castle," which you may remember from last week as the folks behind the world's most pathos-drenched roommate ad. It turns out, the guy who "founded" (aka rented) the Startup Castle is a former Chippendales dancer and castmember on a pirate reality show. Neat! After that we get to Game of Thrones, and whether departing from the books has made it open season on criticisms of being gratuitous/rapey/predictable. We move onto Mad Max: Fury Road and the great (misguided) "Is It Feminist??" debate. Also, we discuss Armond White's review. Finally, we finish things off with your emails, including a question about honk shaming and a Smash Mouth story. Enjoy, and please continue Frotting.

This week on the Frotcast, Incompatent Thieves director Tom Dean joins Matt Lieb and myself (Vince Mancini) in the Frotquarters. We begin discussing the epic beef between Third Eye Blind's Stephan Jenkins and Smash Mouth's Steve Harwell, the most 90s beef since the Arch Deluxe. After that we discuss 80s sitcom theme songs and how bizarrely similar they all were. They were all somehow about a perfect family, that was an antidote to depression, bad news on the TV, and a general apocalyptic hellscape they implied existing outside the set. Then we get into the Kurt Cobain documentary, Montage of Heck, heroin addicts in general (a subject with which Matt is somewhat familiar), and why Courtney Love is so perfectly hatable. Is Courtney Love everything we accused Yoko of being? Finally, we finish off talking about "The Startup Castle," and their ad for a roommate who doesn't wear too much makeup, watch too much TV, drink, smoke, have too many tattoos, listen to songs with explicit lyrics, or drive too much - another perfectly insufferable illustration of everything despicable about the tech industry in Silicon Valley. Fun! Fun! Fun!

After losing a week to technical difficulties, we're back! This week, we're discussing the release of the Star Wars trailer and the people competing to see who can be the most nostalgic for Star Wars. The big question is, what’s the line between acceptable, earnest fandom for something that meant a lot to you, and cheering while a corporation sells you your childhood? We try to answer that, talk about "thug" as we solve race relations in Baltimore, listen to some of Joe Sinclitico's stand-up comedy about koala hunting, and try to figure out if Matt Lieb actually likes us. As for the listener who asked if the Frotcast was dying, no, it is not, we just had some troubles upgrading our recording set up. We've come a long way, from shouting into a single mic to multi-track recording. Not successfully, mind you, but it's been a journey.

I was in SoCal this week for the MTV Movie Awards and Alison Rosen's podcast, so the regular Frotcrew is gone this week (though Bret did still show up to the Frotquarters, poor Bret). Not to fear, though, because I was able to get a couple fan-favorite guests to record the make-up 'cast, comedians Joe Sinclitico and Matt Louv (the museum of comedy). We talked about Joe's righteous mustache and it smelling like a condom, the MTV Movie Awards, Furious 7, and discussed whether Vin Diesel is trying to bring up Paul Walker as much as Rudy Giuliani brings up 9/11. Enjoy.

There's a new bus service in San Francisco that basically helps rich tech nerds pay a few more dollars not to see poor people. Is this a sign of the apocalypse or is it basically all capitalism in a nutshell? Either way, it seems like we the San Francisco residents are guinea pigs in an experiment to see what it'd be like if tech companies ruled the world. WE HAVE SEEN YOUR FUTURE, AND IT SUCKS. We discuss the infantilizing effect of tech before moving onto 'Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,' with Ben back on the pod after two months in Central America. He talks where to go and what to spend and all that good stuff. We finish up with your emails and voicemails about your personal encounters with Name Of The Year contestants like Dr. Loki Skylizard, and Tokyo Sexwale.

Twollie Vanderworf! Tokyo Sexwale! Taco BM Monster! Dr. Loki Skylizard! These are all people's real names, uncovered every year by the folks at NameOfTheYear.com. Using their 2015 Name Of the Year bracket, we all chose our Name Of The Year fantasy teams, with guest and fantasy sports expert Matt Ufford of The Inactives podcast. After that, we discuss competitive Paul Walker grieving among the Furious 7 cast, and go down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory websites. Enjoy, and go to AudibleTrial.com/Frotcast for your free Audiobook download.

This week on the Frotcast, we talk The Jinx and Robert Durst. The appeal of the show, is it closure or characters? Or is it just that Robert Durst is nuts in so many different ways that it seems like there's a new one every week? And why would people feel closure at the end of the show, because the weird guy was talking to himself? Wouldn't any rational human being know how did it from the very beginning? Did you hear the story about his rubber mask? About him killing his dogs? So we talk about that for a while, and compare it to Serial. Then we bring on Laremy Legel to talk about 30 for 30's I Hate Christian Laettner and tell us about The Divergent Series: Insurgent. As Bret says, "This is the dumbest book I've ever had told to me."

Matt also tells the story about a listener trying to make Matt look bad so he could have sex with his girlfriend. No snitching!

The usual crew couldn't get together in the Frotquarters this week, so in lieu of a regular frotcast, I'm posting audio of FilmDrunk interviews with Homegrown Video's Farrell Timlake, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking author Anya Von Bremzen, and a couple quickies from the AVN Awards. Sorry, and I hope you enjoy these! As always, email us at frotcast@gmail.com, leave us a voice mail at 415 275 0030

This week, we welcome Somerville, Mass's finest (don't say Boston...), comedian Steve Post to talk about the Edward Snowden documentary CitizenFour (as well as the upcoming Oliver Stone biopic and Oliver Stone movies in general). We also Skype in Ben from Costa Rica to talk about his Kickstarter project, his post-testicular cancer vision quest and current swing through Central America. He updates us on staying fit and the backpacking ladies, we get in deep to talk about the Oxy epidemic that drove Steve Post to leave Somerville, talk about Matt Lieb's latest Xfinity commercial and getting "shrunk" in a Nature Valley commercial. Then Steve one-ups him with his story about playing a bartender in a Silicon Valley episode, thanks to his nine years of actual bartending experience.

Enjoy, and check out audibletrial.com/Frotcast to sign up for a free trial and get your free audiobook.

This week on the Frotcast, comedian Jane Harrison joins Matt Lieb, Vince, and Bret in the Frotquarters. We open talking about Mystique from X-Men being the perfect woman, which leads us to the appeal of 'Fifty Shades Of Grey' and pretty much all things porn - watching it, guilt surrounding it, evolution of desires, the search for novelty, whether the younger generation's ideas about sex have been skewed by, whether it changes intimacy in a relationship, etc. etc. It just sort of happened. We also talk about the Oscars and pitch a TV show about Matt Lieb and his silicone sex butt, which he kept in his closet when he lived with his mom. Matt Lieb is a sick, sick, man.

ALSO. Check out http://www.audibletrial.com/Frotcast and get your free Audiobook. All you have to do is sign up. For one thing, it's a great way to support the Frotcast, and for another, Audible is actually a great company. I go through three audiobooks a month myself, so it's not like I'm recommending something I don't use myself - I use the sh*t out of it.

We open this week's show discussing Matt Lieb's romantic Valentine's Day on Snuggly Rock, which leads in to other Valentine's Day stories, and whether we feel pressure to have sex when we can hear lots of sex happening around us. I read the infamous Jack White Guacamole Letter of 2015 and we discuss whether Jack White realizes how insane he sounds. Bret hadn't heard us talk about Jupiter "Bees Recognize Royalty" Ascending yet, and we discuss whether Mila Kunis being able to control bees counts as a Beeus Ex Machina, or if it's more of a Chekhov's Bees kind of situation. We get into SNL 40, with the big question being, should they have invited Sarah Palin on and thus be complicit in making her look like a good sport? Then we bring on Brian Abrams to discuss his new book, 'Party Like A President: True Tales of Inebriation, Lechery, and Mischief From the Oval Office,' and to talk about 'Wetlands,' the infamous German vagina movie that's now on Netflix. The big question about Wetlands seems to be: does punk rock need a political agenda, or can it just be taking a dump onstage purely for the pleasure of taking a dump? Enjoy, Frot On, Tell a Friend.

Comedians Matt Lieb and Torio Van Grol are in the Frotquarters this week, with Film.com's Laremy Legel joining via Skype. We open discussing Matt Lieb's recent audition for Adam Devine's House Party, and lead into arguments about Kurt Cobain and our pitches for Spider-Man now that Marvel is rebooting the franchise. We get into that crazy NY Times article about the internet shame machine and the girl who lost her job and had to move to Africa over a bad AIDS joke. Laremy comes on to talk about his viewings of Kingsman: The Secret Service, and of course, Fifty Shades of Grey, leading to Matt Lieb's truly priceless Christian Grey impression. Enjoy.

Back from hiatus, we've got Matt Lieb and Brendan in the Frotquarters with Ben joining via Skype. We talk about Matt Lieb's newly-acquired quicksand porn (thanks, listeners!), read an alleged treatment for Kevin Spacey's body-swap-with-a-cat comedy sent in by a listener, and talk about my trips to the AVN Awards and to Sundance. Then we bloop in Gavin Booth, director of Scarehouse, to talk about the challenges of shooting a horror movie and being Canadian, and also the dumb things people ask at Q & As. Also, I convince everyone to see Jupiter Ascending because it's one of the most ridiculous movies ever. Enjoy!

American Sniper was the big topic this week, so we all saw it, and invited on my former co-worker and roommate, SB Nation's Matt Ufford, Marine veteran, and host of the new podcast The Inactives. Is the movie any good? Is Chris Kyle a hero? A murderer? Does the film paint fake babies in a false light? Is it a proper representation of military tactics? We answer all these and more, probably the longest we've ever talked about a single movie. Besides that, Bret talks about celebrating his birthday in a sensory deprivation tank, Matt Lieb eats the supermarket sushi he bought with food stamps, and we read your emails about a guy with two buttholes. Enjoy, and for the love of God, tell a friend. Download it multiple times yourself, spread the word. Frot-nation is sweeping the nation, and you can get in early.

We open this week discussing Matt Lieb's new haircut, which makes him a dead ringer for Lena Dunham's boyfriend, Fun guitarist Jack Antonoff. This naturally leads to 'Girls' infamous butt-eating (analingus) scene, which seems to have been written just for Matt. Who famously eats so much butt he has a bib with a picture of a butt on it. Just keeping things high brow like always.

After that, the Space Dockett includes: the politicization of Facebook, 'Frank,' and Film.com's Laremy Legel joins us to talk about Michael Mann's 'Blackhat,' aka Thordfish (thanks to commenter Erswi for that one). And did I mention Ben is back in the studio??? Enjoy, and Frot on.

We've got three comedians in the Frotquarters this week to discuss a movie about a comedian, Obvious Child, along with Bret, who hates comedy, story, humans, and existence itself. Asked by his wife what he wants for Christmas, Bret answers "I don't want to be," and so she bought him a gift certificate to a sensory deprivation tank. Other topics include Collective Soul Bird, 'Girls' Vs. 'Entourage,' the Josh Gad Gad Movie Game, Kid Rock saying rap rock is gay, and lots of weird sex stuff. Guests: Matt Lieb, Vince Mancini, Jane Harrison, and Bret. We ate pizza. Won't you be our friend?